Written by Stefan Hansen   

Do you know how little the chance of winning the Mega Millions lotto is? It's tiny. Less than 1 in 200 million. In other words: if every adult American played a different string of numbers, only one would win. This low probability can be hard to grasp, and many people misunderstand such probabilities. Many would - referring to the chance of winning the Mega Million lotto - say something like this: that only happens once every 200 million times. This, of course, is not true. It's not impossible for a certain string of numbers to be the winning numbers two, or even three, times in a row. The probability is extremely low, but it can happen. So, saying that a string of numbers happens once every 200 million times is - obviously - incorrect.

Having said that, let me now ask: how many times do you have to play the Mega Million lotto to win? It's a trick question. Please think about it, before you read any further. If your answer was "200 million times", you were wrong. If you answer was "a billion billion times," you were wrong as well. If your answer was "I cannot say for sure," you were right. Now let me ask you another question: knowing that the chance of winning the Mega Million is less than 1 in 200 million, could you win the Mega Million by playing just once in your life? Yes, of course you could - if you were extremely lucky!

Now, did you know that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the French-Swiss border is kind of like the Mega Million lotto - in the sense that it's a gamble? In the LHC, particles are smashed together at close to the speed of light. When this happens there is a chance a black hole will be created, and there is a chance this black hole will grow and - sooner or later - swallow earth. Ending it all. What the Mega Million lotto and CERN's LHC lotto have in common is that it's a game of chance. The difference between the Mega Million lotto and CERN's LHC lotto is that in the Mega Million you can be lucky to win, in CERN's LHC lotto we might all be unlucky and lose. All and everything.

The Mega Million lotto and CERN's LHC lotto also differs in another way. You risk nothing if you do not play the Mega Million, only people who voluntarily choose to gamble risk losing. But when it comes to CERN's LHC lotto, we all risk something - our lives - and we cannot opt out on our own initiative. As long as the physicists at CERN keep spinning their particles, we're all hanging in a thin thread. Is that alright? Is it alright that a couple of thousand people gamble with the lives of others? I don't think so, and I don't think any sane human being would disagree.

The only way to stop this madness is by spreading the message, in the hope that people in power will listen. I therefore urge you to do just that. Thank you.

If you doubt such an end-all scenario can happen, please read my previous articles regarding this matter - either here on Reader Supported News, or on my blog, Hansen's MagNET.

Written by Stefan Hansen
www.hansensmag.net